www.byzcath.org Forums Faith & Christian Life The Christian East & West Eastern Catholic Mission work

I feel a little less sorry for myself now. one priest for all of Scotland.
Much Love,
Jonn

Gordo:

As I posted previously, the Archeparchy of Pittsburgh and the Eparchies of Parma and Van Nuys are 2003-04 grantees of separate funds geared specifically for your purposes.

The grants are organization-oriented, i.e., there are persons hand-picked by each Bishop to safeguard, implement, and monitor the utilization of the grants, which are, apparently, renewable annually.

The trick is for one to be bold enough to ask if your parish is a participant.

Dear Friends,

I think the worst mistake we can make here is to assume that just because people are in our churches, that they have been "evangelized."

This was made quite plain to me over the weekend during our school's PTA meeting.

The parents told me they truly do appreciate the religious education their kids are getting as they come home and start up conversations about it with them - so they encouraged me to continue.

At the same time, parents came to me individually to tell me that although they go to church they have crises of faith etc.

One parent said that she thinks her home is haunted - and then got on to the subject of her ouija board that she still keeps in her house.

I told her to get rid of it etc.

They have basically no inkling about what a prayer life truly is (one parent got up and told me that my teaching on the Jesus Prayer is good that who has the time etc.).

I personally would love to see some sort of parish-based "hands-on" course on practical spirituality - how to pray, what to pray, how to attend the Liturgy etc.

Reaching out to others is great and more power to those who do that.

But we cannot move forward if our ranks aren't in proper formation!

Alex (next year's Principal )

Alex,
you seem to be on the ball. I have had similar experiences.
Much Love,
Jonn

Dear John,

Thank you!

I came across similar issues when I was doing my doctorate in sociology with parents and their children.

It's amazing how things do NOT change over time!

Alex

indeed

Excellent point as always, Alex!

I think Pope Paul VI said something similiar to that in his encyclical "On Evangelization in the Modern World". The Church must first be evanglized in order to evangelize. Any parish mission/outreach strategy should have that focus...which, I might add, should include a liturgy filled with eastern vitality!

Many years -

Gordo

Anhelyna-

How many Eastern Catholics are there in Scotland and the rest of the UK? Not sure of the logistics of this, but have you ever considered sponsoring an icon workshop? Sometimes that tends to generate great interest in the Christian East from many directions...

Peace -

Gordo

Dude,
why not share with us how to go about with such a workshop. I am intrigued.
Much Love,
Jonn

Alex,

I think that our tendency to not be involved in evangelization is a function of several factors.

Except for the Churches of the Middle East, in the lands native to our Churches, there were principally two groups of believers - Catholic and Orthodox - and we were one or the other, so who was there to evangelize? Those who shared ground with Muslims often did so in a continuing struggle that didn't lend itself to prosletyzing.

Historically, our peoples were not generally among the first settlers of new and unexplored lands - Americas, Oceania, Pacific, Southern Africa. These were initially the bailiwick of Western Europeans. By the time our ancestors arrived, their challenge was to establish themselves sufficiently to serve their own peoples and maintain their own traditions, they had neither the time nor resources to go forth and seek others.

We were never faced with a movement that directly challenged our Catholicity or Orthodoxy, such as our Latin brothers and sisters encountered in Protestantism. The closest thing we had to that was the direct assault on our liturgical practices by Latin missionaries and our own assaults on one another.

I don't think it's difficult to see that once the initial wholesale conversions of nations in Apostolic times and the near beyond, there were relatively few opportunities available for us to undertake evangelization. There were some few and those were extraordinarily successful for a time - I'm thinking of the Assyrian excursions into Mongol lands.

Thus, we have no tradition of evangelization and, in seeking to initiate one, we are invariably hampered by, among other things, the way we style ourselves - we aren't just "Catholics" or just "Orthodox".

We are "Eastern" Catholics, "Eastern" Orthodox, "Orientals", Greeks, Ukrainians, Melkites, Byzantines, Ruthenians, Carpatho-Rusyns, Antiochians, Syriacs, Copts, Ethiopians, Armenians, Slovacks, Russians, Romanians, Albanians, Maronites, Italo-Greico-Albanians (say that 3 times fast), and the list goes on ...

In a world where folks think about ethnicity in two respects - their own family "roots" and whatever group they see as impinging on their way of life - we are Churches that by our names still, even if not always by our nature, are ethnic enclaves, seeming New World bastions of exotic far-off places, curiousities to the West. How one changes that without abandoning or destroying who we are, I don't know.

Many years,

Neil

Dear Neil,

Yes, the Eastern Europeans came here as either Catholics or Orthodox - and don't forget the ensuing struggles between them!

But the force that attacked their Churches was not, as you correctly state, Protestantism, but communism and its anti-Christian butchers.

Soviet communism came in to destroy Catholicism and Orthodoxy - but, in Ukraine's case, it came to destroy "Ukrainian Orthodoxy" and "Ukrainian Catholicism."

The cultural factor, that you Americans call, wrongly I would add, "ethnic" was and is important in the overall religious identity of these churches and the people that belong to it.

Western people tend to see in Soviet communism the anti-religious factor only - in fact, Great Russian chauvinism was another factor linked with it as well.

The Eastern Churches, such as the UGCC, were forced largely by socio-political circumstances to be sure, to become national churches, as Donald Attwater shows in his books on the Eastern Churches.

There is nothing wrong with that and it points to a successful inculturation of the Church and the gospel message.

The issue here is not only how to reach out to others not of the religious/cultural fold, but also, I believe, how best to establish a truly English-language North American Eastern Christianity.

An additional issue is not only the one about the historic Latin Church's successes in evangelization (in its own, truth be told, jurisdictional territory, as it has itself defined), but also how WE as Eastern Christians can justify ANY outreach that might lead to Western Christians and Catholics in particular to join our Eastern Churches.

We just might be open to an inter-Church conflict here, being charged with "poaching" as someone has already said other Christians.

The UGCC Patriarch has already recommended more English-language liturgies and other North American adaptations. There are parishes here where I live that are very "convert friendly" and others that are even MORE "convert friendly" - as long as the convert speaks Ukrainian .

And then we have my parish where there is constant warfare between Canadian Ukrainians and Ukrainian Canadians . . .

To illustrate the nature of the conflict, we have a flagpole that has no flag on it . . . This issue wouldn't come up in the U.S., but it does in Canada.

By the way, I'm preparing to enter the Hospitallers of St Lazarus under the Melkite Patriarch and am already receiving their publications . . .

Alex